


Still

by Heart_Seoul_Soshi



Category: Descendants (Disney Movies)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-27
Updated: 2018-05-27
Packaged: 2019-05-14 11:55:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14769135
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Heart_Seoul_Soshi/pseuds/Heart_Seoul_Soshi
Summary: Mal dreams that she stands idly by and lets Evie fall to the curse of the Dragon's Eye scepter





	Still

**Author's Note:**

> from an anonymous request on tumblr

Mal never understood what people meant when they said it was like they were watching something in slow motion.  
  
Until now.  
  
Voices had been screaming inside her head; only her own and her mother’s arguing back and forth, but it seemed like a whole horde of them, a screeching cacophony building and building until the pressure felt like it would burst her skull.  
  
Evie was falling. That was what Mal watched in slow motion. She was still somehow graceful, collapsing onto the floor like a ballerina might settle into a pose. The clatter of a gnarled black scepter as it spilled from her limp hand echoed like crashing thunder, deafening, almost threatening to make Mal clamp her hands over her ears to block out the noise, block out the voices.  
  
And when everything stopped—the clattering and the voices and the thunder and screeching and screaming—the sharp silence was just as deafening as the paralyzing concert of noise. Almost worse, in point of fact. The piercing whistle of silence seemed to stab Mal clean through like the honed point of a sword.  
  
“…Evie?”  
  
It was a wonder she could even hear her own voice.  
  
“…Evie??”  
  
Evie would not answer.  
  
Thump. Thump thump. Thump thump thump thump thump.  
  
Mal’s heartbeat drummed erratically in her chest, pounding painfully on her ribs and seizing her breath. Weren’t Carlos and Jay here? She wanted to scream at them to run, to get some kind of help, but only one thing would come out of her trembling lips.  
  
_“Evie!!”_  
  
She was like one of the carelessly discarded porcelain dolls carted in on the Auradon barge; beautiful, elegant. Pale. Broken.  
  
Dead.  
  
One step was all Mal could take before she too utterly collapsed, her legs giving out and dropping her to her knees to crawl over to Evie.  
  
“Evie, please!! Quit messing around! Get up!”  
  
Mal knew good and well that Evie wasn’t messing around.  
  
This had all been part of the plan, hadn’t it? Evie was to touch Maleficent’s scepter and suffer the curse laid upon it, leaving Mal free to claim the glory and triumphantly carry the scepter back home to mother. So why was Mal so fiercely intent on shrieking until her throat went raw, shrieking Evie’s name to draw out a response,  _any_  sort of response? Her fingers curled around Evie’s shoulders, and the fact that Evie didn’t cry out in pain at the nails digging tightly into her skin was proof enough that Mal’s frantic shaking of her would do no good.  
  
“Wake up, Evie. Wake up. Evie? E!! Wake up!!”  
  
A broken record. Thick strands of blue fell into Evie’s pale face as Mal shook her so hard they both threatened to break. Pale was not a thing that Evie should’ve been. Mal couldn’t breathe, air shot into her burning lungs in short, uneven paces. Her hands trembled so violently as she rolled Evie over onto her back and pressed a palm flat against her heart. She felt nothing.  
  
“Do not do this to me!!”  
  
What did it even matter? This was Evie’s whole purpose when Mal recruited her along on the journey to retrieve the legendary scepter. Carlos was brains, Jay was brawn, and Evie was bait. Everything had gone according to Maleficent’s plan, the plan her voice screamed into Mal’s brain as Evie’s cautious hand slowly reached out to take the mystical staff. She meant nothing to Mal, Mal hardly even knew her, so why did it feel everything like she’d just watched her own heart be ripped straight from her chest and thrown to the floor?  
  
“H-how?? How do I fix this??” she spoke to no one, and no one listened. “…Evie, tell me how to wake you up.  _…Please._  I can’t just sit here and do nothing!! Evie!!”  
  
She raised a hand, as if ready to strike her, but her veins were running cold with ice, and she froze. The hand shook all the way down as she painstakingly lowered it to her side, clenching her fingers into a fist to keep her from doing anything stupid.  
  
“Let  _me_ touch the scepter!” Mal pleaded desperately as if it weren’t already far too late. “I’ll fall under the curse, not you! Hey! You were banished because of me! It was my fault you spent your whole life alone, I can’t let you be alone here, too!”  
  
What was it like to fall prey to a sleeping curse, Mal wondered? Sleep was supposed to be peace, safe and soothing. But sleep could also be terror, nightmarish lands with dark and clawing horrors at every turn. Knowing her mother, Mal could guess which one was most likely the case. Evie may have radiated soft peace on the outside, with her eyes resting shut and her hair fanned out around her, but on the inside she was trapped in one of those nightmare worlds, screaming, running, so terribly frightened…and alone.  
  
Mal made a wild grab for the scepter, stretching over Evie to snatch it off the floor. She knew better; the curse was already enacted, that was the point of Evie being here in the first place. It wouldn’t spell Mal now that it had spelled another. But still she clutched it tight in both her hands, squeezing so hard that the sharp grooves of the black wood threatened to pierce her skin and make her bleed.  
  
Evie was alone. She’d trusted Mal, helped Mal, risked life and limb on this journey with her, and now she was alone.  
  
“…Let her go,” Mal shakily whispered to the scepter. A quiet voice quickly turned into anything but. “I don’t care what my mother says! Let her go!!”   
  
The scepter wouldn’t listen. Mal was used to demanding and to ordering. She wasn’t quite as used to asking.  
  
“…Please give her back to me.”  
  
There was that silence again, oppressive and shrill as it rang in Mal’s ears, driving her mad. How was anyone supposed to hear her pleas over all this incessant noise??  
  
“You don’t understand, I  _need_  her!!” Mal shouted.  
  
And then a gasp. Her own gasp. She “needed” Evie? Since when did the daughter of Maleficent need anyone or anything? Did she dare take it back?  
  
No, not with Evie laying before her so still, so stiff. Was this what it was like? When her mother whipped away her cape and the three good fairies had to find their princess collapsed on the floor, tiara spilled from her golden hair? When the seven dwarfs cried and mourned Snow White tucked away in a soft bed, where gently flickering candlelight couldn’t strike out the heavy darkness in the room? Mal could never understand how the so-called “good” people of Auradon could sit back and let the villains rot and waste in an island prison, but now, she did.  
  
If these were the kind of unspeakable horrors the villains had wreaked, then rotting and wasting was exactly what they deserved.  
  
“Give her  _back to me!!”_  
  
With a wild cry Mal raised the scepter over her head to muster all the power she could before smashing the thing against the floor. The Dragon’s Eye jewel nestled within utterly shattered, shards of green skittering everywhere. She let the scepter fall from her weak hands, and the wood clattered sharply as the staff rolled away. Evie hadn’t stirred, not in the slightest.  
  
Mal never cried. Not once in her life. But maybe, just this once, she thought she’d give it a try.  
  
“…E, what am I supposed to do?” she reached out to gingerly touch Evie’s cheek. It was ice cold.   
  
The hot tears were a striking contrast to ice cold skin, suffocating and blinding Mal as they filled her eyes, flooded her throat.  
  
“You have to tell me. You have to wake up. I n-need you to wake up,” she sniffed. Every blink sent a river running down her cheeks. “Evie? I’m begging you, okay? I’m begging you!!”  
  
Mal, daughter of Maleficent, reduced to begging. The searing ache in her chest and the sick twisting in her stomach both knowing that the most perfect pair of soft brown eyes wouldn’t see the light of day until a thousand endless years had passed.  
  
“Come back to me, Evie!!”  
  
One last scream. One last plea. Lost to the unforgiving dark just like the fallen angel before her.  
  
“Mal! Wake up!”  
  
How jarring it was to suddenly hear another’s voice, frantically shouting the same words Mal had cried out over and over again to an empty room. So jarring that Mal found her head spinning as she rocketed upright—in bed. She wasn’t in an empty room laced with stabbing silence and anguished sobs, she was in  _her_ room, at Auradon Prep. A warm bed beneath her and a click of the endtable lamp revealing the body beside her.  
  
Evie.  
  
“…E-Evie?” Mal’s voice shook. After the sudden light stopped shooting invisible arrows into her eyes, she squinted and saw Evie sitting up next to her, face drained and pale like she’d just seen a ghost.  
  
“Mal, you were…you were screaming,” she reached her hand out as if to comfortingly touch Mal, but stopped halfway, unsure if that was what Mal wanted. “You were having a nightmare.”  
  
“…A nightmare?” Mal clenched the bedsheets tightly in her fists. The word sounded foreign in her ears. “No, it wasn’t a…it was  _real,_ it…”  
  
Mal was so shaken, Evie could see and feel and hear it. She risked it, risked carefully drawing Mal into her arms for a loving hug, a silent  _“I’m here, Mal. Right here.”_  And Mal utterly broke the moment she came into the embrace, bursting into tears and sobbing mournfully into the shoulder of Evie’s pajama shirt. Evie kept her so close, kissing the tears off her cheeks and murmuring a gentle “It’s okay…you’re okay” in Mal’s ear every now and then.  
  
“Evie…” Mal cried helplessly, curling her fingers around Evie’s collar.  
  
She had to feel her, to feel how she was warm, and  _alive._  
  
“Mal, what happened? What did you dream?”  
  
Could Mal even say it out loud?  
  
“…You fell under my mother’s sleeping curse. We were going to get her scepter and…I made you touch it. I w-watched you fall, and…then you were gone.”  
  
A voice choked with tears broke Evie’s heart.  
  
“…I remember it happening a little bit differently than that. I remember a very brave girl heroically sacrificing herself for me, and I know that girl would never let me be the victim of a sleeping curse, or any curse for that matter. It was only a bad dream, Mal. We’re both okay.”  
  
Mal certainly didn’t feel okay. She felt like something sickly and dark had crawled inside her, rooting itself deep within her chest.  
  
“…I let you die.”  
  
It was a horror that Mal couldn’t even admit to herself in the dream, out of fear that the truth would drive her insane, snap her mind. A thousand year sleep was, by all rights, a death sentence. No breath, no heartbeat, Evie eventually waking up to a completely changed landscape, an entirely foreign world where any friendly face she could’ve counted on to see her through had been dead and rotted for centuries upon centuries.  
  
“Mal, look at me.”  
  
Evie tucked her hand under Mal’s chin to tilt her gaze up, and Mal had to wipe her eyes to see her properly.  
  
“Your mother’s scepter was a long time ago. If you wouldn’t let it curse me then, you certainly wouldn’t let it curse me now. A nightmare, Mal. You and I have both had our share of them, literal ones and figurative. But when we open our eyes, and we find each other, then the dark things chasing us suddenly don’t seem as scary anymore. I’m here, Mal. See for yourself.”  
  
She took Mal’s hand and pressed it to the center of her chest, letting her feel the steadily beating thump.  
  
“…I love this heart,” Mal murmured, closing her eyes for a moment like the beat was a soothing melody.  
  
“And it loves you with everything it has. I know it’s safe with you, and I know I am too. It was only a bad dream, it can’t hurt either of us now.”  
  
“…Then you’re really here?” Mal was afraid to let herself truly believe it.  
  
Evie’s smile was gentle.  
  
“You’re free to check.”  
  
And Mal did, checking every inch as she kissed Evie all over. She followed a path along the striking line of Evie’s jaw, nuzzling her hair and its sweet-smelling scent aside to get at her ear and check there with a soft little bite. But not until she draped her arms over Evie’s shoulders and fell into both her body and her deep kiss was she really convinced. She imagined she could still feel Evie’s heart, beating softly against her own chest as they held each other as close together as they could.  
  
“…Hi Evie,” Mal finally smiled.  
  
“Hi Mal.”  
  
“E, I was so scared…so sure that I’d lost you. That I was the reason I lost you…”  
  
Mal slipped herself down Evie’s body so that her head rested against her chest, so that she could hear Evie’s breathing and her heartbeat with crystal clear clarity. The steady in, out, in, out of her breath relaxed Mal like sinking into a hot bath. Soon, her own hysteric heartbeat and frantically paced breaths were calming and steadying too. And then, when Evie’s fingers were combing through her hair, one long brush after another? Sheer bliss.  
  
“What if I told you that you could never lose me? Would you believe me?” Evie softly asked. “I’ll always be in your heart, Mal.”  
  
“I don’t want you in my heart. I want you out here with me,” Mal whispered.  
  
“Okay, then I’ll be out here with you.”  
  
“Forever,” Mal firmly said, with a lingering tone to her voice that clearly meant she was waiting for Evie to agree.  
  
“Forever,” Evie nodded. “Mal, I love you. I’m never leaving you. The nightmares can’t hurt me, and I won’t let them hurt you, so let’s go back to sleep.”  
  
Mal felt that she actually could with Evie’s arms around her, settling her back onto their pillow. The second that Evie rolled over to turn off the light was a second too long apart for both of them, but soon enough they were curling in close to one another, getting and staying lost in each other’s touch. A horrible nightmare had taken Evie away from Mal, but forgiving reality brought her back, and Mal was intent to never let her go again.  
  
“I love you, Evie,” Mal whispered in her ear.  
  
She was so warm, snuggled against her. So safe. And what’s more, she knew that Evie was safe, falling back to sleep at her side. A bad dream melting away as two hearts were put to peaceful rest.  
  
“I love you too, Mal.”  
  
A feather soft kiss against her lips was the last thing Mal felt before sleep pulled her down and down, and she smiled. For every time they said goodnight they also said goodbye, but both slept easy knowing it wouldn’t be for long. Not until a morning, and not even until the occasional early afternoon. It was the space between asleep and awake, where two worlds came to meet.  
  
Mal didn’t have to wait the long, arduous hours until morning to see the love of her life again, and neither did Evie. In just a few moments they would meet in their dreams, and side by side, hand in hand, the nightmares wouldn’t dare to reach them.


End file.
